Compare, contrast, be miserable

Larry Johnson, For the Express-News

Published
5:42 pm CDT, Friday, October 13, 2017

Louise Linton, wife of Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, got into an Instagram spat recently after posting a photo of her designer outfit (complete with hashtags) during a trip with her husband. Linton may be an extreme example, but aren’t we all guilty of trying to keep up with the Joneses? less

Louise Linton, wife of Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, got into an Instagram spat recently after posting a photo of her designer outfit (complete with hashtags) during a trip with her husband. Linton may be ... more

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Louise Linton, wife of Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, got into an Instagram spat recently after posting a photo of her designer outfit (complete with hashtags) during a trip with her husband. Linton may be an extreme example, but aren’t we all guilty of trying to keep up with the Joneses? less

Louise Linton, wife of Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, got into an Instagram spat recently after posting a photo of her designer outfit (complete with hashtags) during a trip with her husband. Linton may be ... more

Photo: Screen Grab

Compare, contrast, be miserable

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Do you play the game of trying to “keep up with the Joneses”? Do you find yourself comparing what you have or what you have accomplished to what your neighbor, your friend, your brother or sister has? They got a pay raise and you didn’t. They caught a bigger fish, they made more money on the stock market, they have a more beautiful rose garden, bought a more expensive car. It goes on and on.

Yes, it’s true that our society thrives on and promotes competition. We compete in sports. We compete in business. We compete in school. And this healthy competition spurs our personal growth, our nation’s economy, and our advances in science and medicine.

Yet, with our society so focused on being smarter, faster, better, we have a cultural obsession with comparison, and it impacts our relationships, keeping us from enjoying what we have. Social media and advertisements, on TV and in print, urge us, challenge us, even scold us to be better — to be richer, healthier, happier than the guy next door. We receive constant reminders about what everyone else is doing— the new car they’re buying, the vacation they’re taking — and this makes us feel envious, discontented.

In her book “I’m Happy For You (Sort Of … Not Really): Finding Contentment in a Culture of Comparison,” Kay Willis Wyma writes: “Whether we believe it or not, there are very few times that we aren’t comparing. We even compare ourselves to ourselves — our expectations, our perceptions, our dreams.”

We are overwhelmed with a sense of inequality. How come professional athletes are paid so much? How come my friend can eat a whole box of chocolates and not gain a pound, and I can’t? How come their kids got scholarships and mine didn’t?

What we are suffering from is what Wyma calls “obsessive comparison disorder.” She says it is our “compulsion to constantly compare ourselves with others, producing unwanted thoughts and feelings that drive us into depression, consumption, anxiety and all-around discontent.”

“Focusing on what we don’t have,” Wyma suggests, “keeps us from realizing and enjoying what we do have. When we shift our focus from what could be to what actually is, we find extraordinary joy in our ordinary lives.”

Sometimes, comparisons can be fun. I am 4 inches taller than my brother Jim, but he is a year and a half older. So, which of us is the “big brother”? We solved this by him labeling me his “big little brother,” or BLB, and I call him my “little big brother,” or LBB. And it works just fine.

So, perhaps, if we’re able to put pride aside and “share rather than compare,” we may find we have more — more friends, more satisfaction, more happiness. Dale Carnegie put it succinctly: “It isn’t what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It’s what you think about it.”